The Second International Conference on Molecular Mechanisms of Fungal Cell Wall Biogenesis, Salamanca, Spain, 27 August?1 September 2003

Abstract

The Second Fungal Cell Wall Meeting brought together about 115 scientists in the beautiful, historical city of Salamanca. It all had started as an initiative some years ago by Yoshifumi Jigami, who brought together the first embryonic group of fungal glycobiologists and cell wall specialists in Tsukuba, Japan. The need was felt to have more such meetings on a formal basis and thanks to the combined efforts of Markus Aebi and Widmar Tanner, the first official meeting on fungal cell walls took place in Ascona, Switzerland in 2001. This year a Spanish team led by Angel Duran and Cesar Nombela hosted the second meeting in Salamanca. Although a majority of the 115 selected participants are working with Saccharomyces and Candida cell walls, the number of attendants studying other fungi including various mycelial species has considerably increased, thereby eliminating artificial divisions created by history. Without pretending to be complete, I would like to present some highlights of this exciting and well-organized meeting. For anyone interested in more details of the topics discussed below, or other preferred topics, I refer to the website of this meeting, which presents the abstracts of 62 talks and 40 posters [1]. For a general review of the area, the reader may consult [2]. As one of the most eminent researchers in this field and presumably also the best and longest known, Enrico Cabib set the scene in his keynote lecture by analyzing the close relationship between cell wall construction and morphogenesis. For example, the septation machinery of yeast cells can be viewed …